EAGLES methodology

The basic idea behind EAGLES work is for the group to act as a catalyst in order to pool concrete results coming from current major European projects. Relevant common practices or upcoming standards are being used where appropriate as input to EAGLES work, particularly in the areas of lexicons, text encoding and speech. Numerous theories are being taken into account, where appropriate, as any recommendation for harmonisation must take into account the needs and nature of the different major contemporary theories. EAGLES is also drawing strong inspiration from the results of major projects whose results have contributed to advancing our understanding of harmonisation issues.

The major efforts in EAGLES concentrate on the following types of activities, which, as seen in the following, show how, along very general lines, the work is organised in the five working groups.

• Detecting those areas ripe for short-term standardisation vs. areas still in need of basic research and development;
• Assessing and discovering areas where there is a consensus across existing linguistic resources, formalisms, speech systems and common practices;
• Surveying and assessing available proposals or contributed specifications in order to evaluate the potential for harmonisation and convergence and for emergence of standards;
• Proposing common specifications for core sets of basic phenomena, recommendations for good practice, for standard methodologies, etc., on which a consensus can be found;
• Setting up guidelines for representation of core sets of basic features, for representation of resources, etc.;
• Feasibility studies for less mature areas;
• Suggesting actions to be taken for a stepwise procedure leading to the creation of multilingual reusable resources, elaboration of evaluation methodologies and tools, etc.